We have drawn blood. Team Covid has stopped ignoring us, finally feels obliged to respond to the facts that are seeping out all over the place with regard to the vaccines. There are two stories, as different as night and day. I’m taking a moment to write about the night story.
We are flooded with official government statistics telling us how wonderful and effective the Covid vaccines have been. I lived in the Washington DC area for 30 years before coming to Ukraine in 2007, the last 18 in Bethesda, the beating blue heart of Montgomery County. It is the home of the National Institutes of Health.
They obviously spend a fortune in taxpayer money on telling you all about their success in treating Covid, and how disproportionately it is killing the unvaccinated. It is interesting how few unvaccinated remain. I would like to have provided a single link to their Covid information website, but it is an octopus. Or maybe onion would be a better metaphor. You can dig forever and never get to the bottom. At any rate, here is a graphic showing how effective they have been at getting jabs into arms.
I would take my hat off to the 5% of the population who have avoided the jab. I doubt they could respond. They are probably mostly under two years old, or drooling and waiting to die in assisted living facilities, where their numbers will bolster the case for unvaccinated dying disproportionately.
The establishment is increasingly aware that outside of such Beltway enclaves as Bethesda a significant portion of the population has come to distrust the official Covid narrative. They are siccing their attack dogs on people who would tell another story. One of these attack dogs is the (supposedly) sweet young mom named Katelyn Jetelina. She obviously gets a boatload of help from deep in the basement of the CDC. Here are two of her recent posts:
The science (and business) behind COVID-19 disinformation. And what to do about it. And COVID-19 vaccines and sudden deaths: Separating fact from fiction.
The articles make handwaving arguments about how the flood of excess deaths might be attributable to drug abuse, obesity in one thing and another. She points out some of the flaws in the movie Died Suddenly. It is easy to do, because Team Reality – Matthew Crawford in particular – has been relentless in its criticism, pointing out that the use of footage of a couple of instances in which the people shown died of something other than the vaccines detracts from the credibility of the movie.
I am not as harsh. It takes a blunt instrument to get the attention of the American public, and most viewers won’t be nuanced enough to reject the whole message just because part of it is erroneous. One need only look at how successful the government has been that gaslighting us with propaganda that includes a judicious mix of truth and falsehood. The fact that Jetelina feels obliged to make this post tells me that Stew Peters is on target.
I would offer a couple of common sense questions. Who is Katelyn Jetelina? How do her credentials stack up against those of Ed Dowd? How do her credentials stack up against those of Matthew Crawford, Joel Smalley and the others who have been telling the other side of the story? Why doesn’t she mention Dowd, whose “Cause Unknown” is scrupulously researched and has not been said to include any misleading information.
A few months ago I rebutted one of Jetelina’s pieces bit by bit. There wasn’t much at all in her post that stood up to scrutiny. I don’t have that much time today, so I would leave it as an exercise for the reader. Take a close look at the things she claims and ask yourself if it makes sense.
My bigger message says that the truth is coming out, in gushers. Anthony Fauci and Jacinda Ardern have resigned. Deborah Birx and others from the Trump administration are admitting some of their errors.
I think of myself as a representative news consumer. These days I delete most of the Covid stuff from my inbox without reading it. I no longer get torqued up. It is time to move on, but nothing else is emerging to grab the headlines. News coverage says that Davos is a dud. I’m sure that the psyops people in the deep state are working feverishly to gin up the next big scare. I can wait.
You’ve got to read between the lines with regard to war news as well. The people reporting can’t tell you, and may not know the whole story. Here’s what I see, and my interpretation.
The Russians are slowly gaining ground around Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast. They have captured Soledar, a town of which nobody had previously heard. The Ukrainians figure the Russians are losing about 800 soldiers a day. I will stick by my December 30 opinion that the Ukrainians are playing rope-a-dope, letting the Russians exhaust themselves in an offensive that makes little strategic sense.
The weather has been unusually warm. If either side had been serious about mounting an offensive in the South, they could not have done it on account of the mud. I was never convinced that it was a good plan for Ukraine in the first place. The first principle of war is to keep the enemy guessing, and Ukraine may have been doing just that. I think time is on our side.
The news from Denys Davidov is mostly about the armaments that Ukraine is going to be receiving from the west. There is a psyops component to this as well. We need to bolster support for Ukraine and demoralize the Russians. Maintaining all of those different types of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery and missile systems is going to be a logistics headache. Nevertheless, they have proven quite effective when used. There is nothing more demoralizing than being shot at when you cannot shoot back. Russian artillery has limited range.
I am glad to note that the United States is not sending the Abrams tanks. That would have been over the top. They would’ve needed a huge logistics train to support a handful of those super-heavy, turbine-powered tanks. Far better for the US to provide things such as the Patriot System, which our partners could not, and let NATO give Ukraine weapons that they can actually maintain.
It is impossible to know what is going on within Russia. There are conflicting stories about the impact of the sanctions on armaments production, the life of the everyday citizen, and everything else. Edward Slavsquat retains his position as the guy I trust most on the subject because he is (1) closest to it and (2) most likely to tell you what he doesn’t know. Reading the tea leaves, we note that almost none of the dire threats that emerge every couple of weeks seem to pan out.
The mobilization is a bust – a vast number of young men scooted over the border, and another vast number were conscripted and sent to the front with minimal training and equipment. They have not been effective. The Iranian drones and ballistic missiles were supposed to have made life here in Kyiv unlivable by now. It remains livable.
Meanwhile, the fuzzy image emerging through a glass darkly is that ordinary Russians are getting a bit bolder about expressing their exasperation with the lack of progress on the military front and increasingly obvious lying by their officials. We note, however, that the prognosticators erroneously predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union for four decades starting in the 1950s, but were nonetheless shocked when it actually happened. During World War II there were reports of coups against Hitler just about monthly, none of which happened. All you can do is hang on.
Oksana asked me to donate to the Ukrainian army through a PayPal account owned by a guy named Roman Donik. What could possibly go wrong? Not coincidentally, at Toastmasters yesterday we had a speech by member Andrii Mytsyk about the profusion of charitable scams during the war.
The first 20 or so results returned by my own Internet search smelled to me of scam. However, buried way down the list was a note that you can donate directly to an account set up by the National Bank of Ukraine for the benefit of the Army. The NBU has had problems in the past, but I have to assume that this account is so highly visible that it is probably okay. Here is the IBAN for money transfers. UA843000010000000047330992708.
This number is unique. The fact that an Internet search will lead you directly to the owner – the NBU – gives me confidence it is the real deal.
Grandma Nadia finds things changed as she returns from two weeks home in Svetlovodsk. I have taken charge of the kitchen and I’m not giving it up easily. Work though she might to stuff the refrigerator with borscht and fish, I’m going to continue cooking my own. The kids can join me in meat, potatoes and vegetables as they like. We agree on salad. The women use the tomatoes, spinach, parsley and dill that I buy. They add cabbage, cucumbers and carrots, which I don’t mind. I put my own vinaigrette – oil, vinegar, garlic and salt – on the table for those who want it.
I spent a couple of days ironing out the technical difficulties in my technique for merging PowerPoint with video. Every piece of software and hardware – Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Corel Draw, Corel Photo Paint, Kofax PDF Plus, Kofax Omnipage, Movavi Movie Editor, microphones (3), movie camera, studio lights etc. - works about 95%. Working around those other 5%s is a killer.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is pleased that at least in this house women respect a guy who will stand his ground. The girls, the younger of whom has resolutely entered the Terrible Twos, continue probing the veracity of this proposition. Eddie and I discuss it. It is a huge lesson for a guy to learn, that women (1) are different, (2) subscribe to a different kind of logic, (3) will frustrate and perplex a guy endlessly with such logic, and (4) are nonetheless indispensable.
This just in. Elon Musk reports major side effects. Maybe somebody will pay attention?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/elon-musk-reveals-major-side-effects-after-2nd-covid-booster_5001304.html?src_src=morningbriefnoe&src_cmp=mb-2023-01-22&est=aILOf1NKhCJ8XIG1itj5ceiEyu5mhf28JIXHJyuOjr8nWzi3XJmvaUz9%2BF%2B13A%3D%3D
Safe and Effective? - by Madhava Setty
https://madhavasetty.substack.com/p/safe-and-effective